Fort Myers Florida Weekly

Life sometimes finds a way

COMMENTARY



Roger WILLIAMS

Roger WILLIAMS

One recent August day, a wandering ecologist named John Cassani found himself bumping up onto Mound Key Archaeological State Park in the middle of the Estero Bay Aquatic Preserve.

There, the Calusa Indians once discarded their seashells in vast quantities, with intent. On what they’d eaten and pitched they built the command center of a sprawling kingdom, a culture of as many as 50,000 people stretched roughly from Tampa Bay to the Ten Thousand Islands and east to Lake Okeechobee.

By the time the Spanish found them early in the 1500s, their shell mound rose an unlikely 30 feet above an island of 125 acres, all of it a human construct topped by a manor house that could hold 2,000 people, Spanish explorers wrote.

The Calusa had been established on the southwest coast for almost two millennia by then. Their forbears in the region dated back about 12,000 years to a time when the gulf shoreline lay 60 miles west of its current location and hungry people probably walked around muttering, “Mammoth — it’s what’s for dinner.”

But only three precipitous centuries after European contact, everything changed. In the early years of the 19th century — about the time Lewis and Clark mounted an expedition to the Pacific — the Calusa finally vanished.

Both the people and culture had been sucked forever into a Charybdis-like vortex of European and American expansion, a fate also suffered by other peninsular tribes: the Mayaca in central Florida. The Chatot who lived along the Apalachicola River in the north. The Ais and the Timucua in the south central and north central parts of the state.

And all that occurred before the Calusa’s water world was crimped, altered and put into critical trouble by 20th and 21st century Americans.

Straddling this history and aware of it, Mr. Cassani — by title, Calusa Waterkeeper — has pursued only a single goal in recent years: to protect the waters and marine life between Lake Okeechobee and the Gulf of Mexico from destruction by people. And sometimes to protect people from dangerously polluted waters.

From experience and by temperament he’s singularly attuned to the dead whispering eternally in transformation beneath our feet. In the years I’ve known him, one of his greatest pleasures has been retrieval: Prying the bones of mammoths, ancient horses or camels from the exposed mud of a riverbank. Plucking a flesh-tearing tooth smaller than a penny or as big as his palm, now mineralized and dripping, from a freshwater creek bed.

Sometimes those teeth have journeyed 9 million or 10 million years all the way from the later Miocene epoch, skipping improbably across the entire evolutionary history of our species to reach his hands.

So no doubt he had quite a day on Mound Key. But in a social media post about it he mentioned none of this.

Instead, Mr. Cassani wrote these words: “First atala butterfly I’ve seen in many years. At Mound Key in Estero Bay. Dozens flitting around a few coontie plants, the host for the caterpillars. The atala is still quite rare but has ventured back from the brink of extinction.”

Then he added one more line: “Life sometimes finds a way.”

As it turns out, the coontie is a cycad, one of about 20 species but Florida’s only native, commonly called arrowroot. It also happens to be the only food source on the planet for the atala caterpillar. At 325 million years and counting, cycads are one of the most ancient plant families. They’re cone or seed-bearing trees or bushes with slender fronds spiking from the top — roughly a yard high in the case of coonties.

Near the southeast coast in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, they once dominated pinelands and hammocks, likely also thriving in the southwest.

Before settlers arrived in numbers, adopting an Indian technique to harvest the plant and process the roots for a starchy flour (carefully, since they’re toxic enough to kill the uneducated), the region must have included seeming blizzards of sun-spangled iridescence shimmering in the low air about the coonties.

When their caterpillars metamorphosed, atala butterflies attended to the coontie kingdom in hordes, swirling through them like pollinating angels, the midnight and Caribbean blues of their iridescent wings traced with teal green hues vividly underwritten by gleaming orange abdomens.

And then suddenly it was gone.

Fort Lauderdale owes its origin to the coontie-processing industry, historians say. After Seminoles attacked and killed a pioneering processor and his family in 1836, the Army’s Major William Lauderdale built a fort on the New River. During World War I, as many as 18 tons of coontie were processed each day in a 10 to 1 ratio of plant pounds to bread-making flour, for troops.

As coontie plants disappeared, so did the butterflies. By 1937, atala butterflies were considered extinct — like passenger pigeons, ivory-billed woodpeckers, the Florida black wolf and others that once inhabited the peninsula.

But unlike them, 42 years later, in 1979, Florida naturalist Roger L. Hammer discovered larvae — caterpillars — feeding on coontie plants on Virginia Key in Biscayne Bay.

As the story goes, Mr. Hammer transported some other coonties to Virginia Key, waited until eggs and larvae adorned the plants, then ferried them to parks, preserves, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden and Long Pine Key a few miles west of Homestead, in Everglades National Park.

Suddenly across the surfaces of a world where plants can date from the Paleozoic, where the water we drink now likely passed through the bodies of dinosaurs, where sharks have left us teeth from lives that predate any human and where the luminous lights of some species have gone forever dark, the butterflies came back.

Life sometimes finds a way. ¦

One response to “Life sometimes finds a way”

  1. Robin Krivanek says:

    How can I get a few Atala caterpillars. I planted coontie years ago and now may have enough to sustain a population on Sanibel.

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